celebrating its Belgian heritage -- a work by Benoît Mernier -- in a program also featuring Haydn and Bruckner, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The

concert is free and open to the public and includes a pre-concert conversation with composer Benoît Mernier. For more information: info@proartequartet.org or

608 217-6786

November 24

Burtonsville, MD

The concert Beyond Beer, Chocolate and Lace: Belgium's Brightest and Best will explore Belgium's contributions to western music with works by Josquin des Prez and Roland de Lassus, César Franck's organ music, the horn hunting calls of the Ardennes, the modern harmonies of Jean Absil and Roland Coryn, songs by Jacques Brel and works by Adolphe Sax, at the Church of the Resurrection. Website

WHAT'S ON

Through December 8

Chestnut Hill, MA

The exhibition Courbet: Mapping Realism expands upon an exhibition shown this summer at the Royal Museums of Fine Arts in Brussels titled Gustave Courbet and Belgium, which examined the role Belgium played in Courbet's development, at the McMullen Museum, Boston College. Website

Through January 5

Washington, DC

Look for works by Flemish artists Aegidius Sadeler and Bartholomaeus Spranger in the exhibition Northern Mannerist Prints from the Kainen Collection, at the National Gallery of Art.

The exhibition Magritte: The Mystery of the Ordinary, 1926-1938 includes 80 paintings, collages and objects, along with a selection of photographs, periodicals and early commercial work, at the Museum of Modern Art.

François Englert of Belgium, together with Britain's Peter Higgs, have won the 2013 Nobel Prize for Physics, predicting the existence of the so-called Higgs boson particle and explaining how elementary matter attains the mass to form stars and planets.

Englert, 80, and fellow-Belgian Robert Brout who died in 2011, were the first to publish these findings. The insight was hailed as one of the most important in the understanding of the cosmos: without this mechanism all particles would travel at the speed of light and atoms would not exist.

A half-century after their prediction, this new building block of nature was detected in 2012 by the giant underground particle-smasher of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) near Geneva. Englert and Higgs were already favorites to share the 8 million Swedish crown ($1.25 million) prize after their theoretical work was vindicated by the CERN experiments.

François Englert joins a distinguished group of Belgian scientists who have been awarded the Nobel Prize: Ilya Prigogine, Christian De Duve, Albert Claude, Corneille Heymans and Jules Bordet.

LONELY PLANET RANKS BELGIUM IN TOP 10 TRAVEL DESTINATIONS

Citing Ypres for commemorations for the centenary of World War I, Brussels for its brilliant Comic Strip Center and Art Nouveau architecture, Ghent's Gravensteen Castle (pictured below), the Belgian seaside with its belle époque resorts, plentiful dunes and wide beaches, the guide book series Lonely Planet has made the case for Belgium as one of the world's top ten travel destinations in 2014. Writer Oliver Bennett also waxes about "golden frites" and Belgium's brewing tradition and tells why Antwerp is ranked 11 in the world's top fashion capitals and why surrealist artist René Magritteis "very Belgian." Read the complete article at Lonely Planet Website.

UNIVERSITY OF LIEGE HONORS INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISTS

The University of Liège has awarded an honorary doctorate to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, an active global network of 175 reporters in more than 60 countries who collaborate on in-depth investigative projects.

The recognition cited ICIJ's work this year on the Offshore Leaks investigation, a global exposé of offshore tax evasion and financial secrecy that is believed to be the largest collaboration in journalism history. ICIJ was among six journalists, cartoonists and academics honored for their contributions to freedom of expression and open access to knowledge.

ICIJ is the international arm of the Washington, DC-based Center for Public Integrity. ICIJ director Gerard Ryle accepted the honor on his organization's behalf on September 25 in Belgium.

STRONG LINE-UP OF BELGIAN FILMS FOR AFI EU FILM SHOWCASE

The American Film Institute is considering three films from Belgium for inclusion in this year's EU Film Showcase, which will run from December 4 -22 at the AFI Silver Theatre, in Silver Spring, Maryland.

Marion Hänsel's film Tenderness (La Tendresse) is billed as a sensitive, heartwarming and beautifully observed drama about a family which comes together during a minor crisis. In The Strange Color of Your Body's Tears (L'étrange couleur des larmes de ton corps) directed by Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani, flashbacks, dream sequences and waking nightmares create a disorienting fugue of cinéma fantastique iconography and atmospherics. The third film, The Verdict (Het vonnis), which won filmmaker Jan Verheyen the Best Director prize at the 2013 Montreal World Film Festival, tells the story of Luc, a successful businessman with a loving family whose life is destroyed after a random street crime leads to the deaths of his wife and daughter.

In mid-November, please check AFI's Website for the screening schedule.

EMBASSY PRESENT AT LOCAL CYCLOCROSS

Belgian colors and flavors were evident at the Tacchino Cyclocross that took place on October 13 in Upper Marlboro, Maryland. The organizers invited the Embassy to participate in the well-attended event that was part of the 2013 Super 8 Cyclocross series, acknowledging Belgium's strong biking tradition.

Cyclocross became popular in
Belgium about a hundred years ago and the renown of Belgian cyclists continues to this day: Sven Nys became World Champion in February 2013, when, for the first time in history, the United States hosted (in Louisville, Kentucky) the World Cyclocross Championships.

A number of Tacchino participants, including race winners, stopped by the Embassy's booth to talk about cycling … and to sample chocolates.

BELGIUM'S POPULATION TOPS 11 MILLION

An increase in the number of births and an influx of over 44,000 immigrants resulted in a .6% increase in Belgium's population in 2012, bringing the number of people officially registered as living in Belgium to 11,099,554.